Alternate GR ammos

[Jeyar123]

Oops - all deleted. I'll try typing faster.

Saw elsewhere a great question and reply. Made me think. What other ammo can I get into the GR without damaging it?

First is a lower tech level ammo that still doesn't damage the GR itself. My thinking is while we don't know the physics exactly, if we try approximate via the delta in damages we've seen when you CAN'T optimize (using the same GR hardware, just we got ammo from the local planet which doesn't have access to the same equipment to "express" the correct tech level).
My thinking is the range goes down to about half, and the effective damage goes down to about a forth.
So the min stays the same and we get an ammo with the same rules (not explosive, 8 shots per ton, 1 slot etc.) Has as ranges: 2 4 8 12 for min, max short, medium and long and lastly a damage of only 4.

So as to not summon the glitch that erased my last attempt to post, I'll just do this one for now.

[DevianID]

I use the low tech steel ammo for 3025 campaigns where the players find a gauss but cant craft/replace the special nickel steel watermelon slugs at proper spec.  It has the -3 primitive damage thing, so does 12 damage instead of 15.  Feels good for my low tech ammo for 3025 campaigns... the Gauss Rifle is still a headcapper, but the lower tech ammo means autocannons still have a damage edge up close.

Low tech ammo is the only one I have ever used with my players on an actual table.  Other fun ammos would be anything you can encase in a ferrous material.

The silver bullet gauss with flechettes is an obvious go to, but since the silver bullet needed a different gun to use that ammo, I would say a weaker version.  Treat the weapon like a 15 damage cluster weapon, with 5 damage clusters and flak bonus (identical to flak ammo in an AC).  A chance to destroy the gauss for shooting steel flechettes is more then fair, like on a 2 the gun explodes as the flechettes expand before leaving the barrel, and on a 3-4 the loose flechettes jam in the barrel.  This way, it makes more sense why they redesigned the barrel and such for the silver bullet gauss, but you can still risk shooting grapeshot out of the standard gauss rifle.

Sabot rounds, so the gauss can shoot the 8 damage light gauss ammo at light gauss ranges, but at only 8 shots/ton cause its padding the round with a sabot to fit in the standard gauss rifle barrel.  Its super inefficient to do so, but it would be possible.  Same for a heavy gauss shooting standard gauss ammo, where it would make more sense to shoot the narrower standard gauss shell to compensate for the range/damage drop-off of the big heavy gauss cannonballs.

The final one would be for delivering packages ballisticly from a gauss rifle.  You lose velocity when you cut the steel content of the slug for the payload, but would gain range by shooting on a ballistic trajectory, with the goal being a net same range but indirect fire penalty to hit.  Would treat it like a big mortar, firing all the normal mortar special ammos.  Gauss Launched flares fired from cannisters, gauss launched AP submunitions fired from a steel cannister, that sort of stuff.  Since a mech mortar 2 has 12 shots per ton, and a mechmortar 4 has 6 shots, the Gauss mortar options would treat the gauss rifle as a MM3 perhaps.  Its not efficient, a MM4 weighs half of a gauss, but it would be possible.

[Daryk]

No weapon that can destroy itself simply by pulling the trigger should make it past prototype stage.

[Grand_dm]

No weapon that can destroy itself simply by pulling the trigger should make it past prototype stage.

This.

[DevianID]

Eh.  Stuff misfires, accidents happen.  Just like range is abstracted, a weapon blowing up on a 2 is abstract.

If we modded wargame red dragon, where a 30 minute game will see a mech fire their ac5 ammo, reload for 30 seconds repeat, for a more realistic slice of warfare, the ac5 would shoot perhaps 100 times in a game.  In battletech, many games are 10 turns or less.  So failure rates are grossly magnified to be a gameplay element.  The Iowa 16 inch gun exploded, and that wasn't an 'unsafe' gun like loading the wrong ammo into a gauss rifle would be, or a hypervelocity AC that's overcharged.  Like range, just assume the failure rate is off by an order of magnitude cause its a game.

Edit: to my point.  If I have a heavy aero wing coming in, im gonna load my gauss with flechette for flak.  I dont care that a 2 will explode the gauss, I need flak right now!  Without the flak id be dead anyway most likely.  A chance something goes wrong is a good way to add some balance to optional rules.  The rapid fire AC rules, with explode on 2 and jam on 4, was my source of inspiration... ill rapid fire standard ACs a ton in games that special rule is allowed, cause the risk/reward is based on 10 gameplay turns, not 100 shots on a 180 turn game like a 'wargame red dragon' more realistic simulation would look like.

[Grand_dm]

Eh.  Stuff misfires, accidents happen.  Just like range is abstracted, a weapon blowing up on a 2 is abstract.

A failure is one thing, a catastrophic explosion is another. It's an arbitrary balance mechanic. But we can agree to disagree.

[Daryk]

An option to explode on 1 in 36 is VERY different than "automatically explodes" on 1 in 36.

[Retry]

The Iowa 16 inch gun exploded, and that wasn't an 'unsafe' gun

That actually made me flinch.  The 16" gun that exploded in '89 absolutely was an unsafe gun at that point in time.  USS Iowa had been decommissioned twice prior to the 1984 recommissioning.  Both the ship and the guns were old and would have been well past their engineering lifespan by that time, the guns had some huge maintenance issues and some of its subsystems either didn't work up to spec or simply did not work at all, the gunnery crew were not well-trained for the guns, some of the powder lots dated back to the 40's, and on top of all this the COs thought it would be a good idea to do "experiments" with supercharging the powder bags and using experimental shells to eek out a bit more range for a weapon system that was already in poor condition.  Earlier that year one of her guns almost suffered the same thing in January, but they managed closed the breechlock before the powder charges had fully combusted.

It was just some accident that happened, it was utter recklessness.


More to the point of the actual topic at hand,

Eh.  Stuff misfires, accidents happen.  Just like range is abstracted, a weapon blowing up on a 2 is abstract.

If we modded wargame red dragon, where a 30 minute game will see a mech fire their ac5 ammo, reload for 30 seconds repeat, for a more realistic slice of warfare, the ac5 would shoot perhaps 100 times in a game.  In battletech, many games are 10 turns or less.  So failure rates are grossly magnified to be a gameplay element.  The Iowa 16 inch gun exploded, and that wasn't an 'unsafe' gun like loading the wrong ammo into a gauss rifle would be, or a hypervelocity AC that's overcharged.  Like range, just assume the failure rate is off by an order of magnitude cause its a game.

Edit: to my point.  If I have a heavy aero wing coming in, im gonna load my gauss with flechette for flak.  I dont care that a 2 will explode the gauss, I need flak right now!  Without the flak id be dead anyway most likely.  A chance something goes wrong is a good way to add some balance to optional rules.  The rapid fire AC rules, with explode on 2 and jam on 4, was my source of inspiration... ill rapid fire standard ACs a ton in games that special rule is allowed, cause the risk/reward is based on 10 gameplay turns, not 100 shots on a 180 turn game like a 'wargame red dragon' more realistic simulation would look like.

1. The theoretical ability to misfire is not reason enough to model it in-game, especially when the true misfire chance is far lower than which can be represented on a 2D6 curve.  The percentage of people I've met that thought UAC jamming is a necessary and fun mechanic is exactly 0%.
  A. One big difference between abstracting range and abstracting weapon jam/explosion chance is that abstracting range facilitates playing the game on tabletop, while abstracting weapon jamming actively hinders it.
2. Jams & self-detonations aren't a good balancing mechanism for the vast majority of equipment, especially weapons.  In fact, BV doesn't even incorporate the jamming/explosion chances in any way whatsoever.
  A. From empirical testing, I can confidently say that none of the autocannons that jam are "balanced" by having the effect.  None of them are particularly exceptional even without the jamming, including stuff like RAC-5s and UAC/20s (The sheer efficiency of energy weapons and Clan missiles is tough to beat).

[idea weenie]

Fragmentation Gauss Round
How about a pre-fragmented Gauss round that is designed to shatter into lots of small pieces when it hits something hard?  Great for AI, but horrible vs armor.

So useless as AA (as it has to hit the ASF before it will fragment), but a spare ammo type that has to be loaded in full-ton amounts.

Basically ammo that works like the Silver Bullet + flechettes, but fired from the regular Gauss Rifle.

Similar rounds with larger pieces would be used vs Battlearmor and Protomechs.



Smoke round
Firing a round that is composed of small carefully measured pieces, this Gauss round is targeted at a specific hex, but will actually detonate 1d3 hexes afterwards (the Gauss Round is moving really fast).  That hex 1d3 hexes farther is where the smoke cloud will be placed, similar in effect to smoke created by an LRM-15.

[Daryk]

IOWA's explosion was WAY less than 1 in 36...

[DevianID]

Yea.  My point is, the Iowa explosion occurred when they fired supercharged powder bags.  And I was advocating firing flechette ammo out of a gauss rifle that is not designed to hold flechettes, the differently designed silver bullet gauss is the gun that safely fires flechettes, and it cant fire standard slugs as a result.  So a 1/36 explosion chance, cause of the 2d6 we have to work with, feels fine.  I mentioned that a realistic explosion chance is lower then 1/36, but for the game we play, with 10 turns on the table, a 1/36 is just enough to happen in a few games to be a gameplay element.

Retry, it sounds like you agree with me.  Loading an ammo type the gauss rifle isnt meant to fire is reckless, like the Iowa gun supercharge.  And like the Iowa gun, its a completely preventable issue--dont experiment with weird ammo loads in your gun, and your gun will be happy!  Recklessly loading the wrong ammo into a gauss rifle thus seems to check out as potentially exploding the gun.

As for jam and BV, yes jam on ultras is a bad mechanic for BV balancing, simply because while we could have appropriately discounted the ultras with the BV formula, the designers didnt.  That doesnt make jamming on a 2 bad, it just makes jamming on a 2 a poor risk reward BV balance issue, because there is no reward for the jam chance (which, with BV, would be a BV discount reward for using a weapon with the jamming flaw).  Back when we balanced with tonnage 30 years ago, the nominal balance was that an ultra did more damage for the tonnage.  However now that we balance with BV, ultras specifically have fallen way off as a weapon.

The reward here is giving flak to gauss, or anti-infantry to gauss, where that capacity did not exist before.  Sure you can make it free, likewise you can increase the damage to 20 for free, but its more in spirit IMHO that a bonus like flak or AI gets countered by a drawback like jam/explosions, seeing as its a completely optional ammo type that can only see play in narrative games since its a fan creation.  If my opponent asked to have an AI infantry or flak gauss round for their Wardog, I know I would be WAY more likely to say yes if it came with a drawback.  The same drawback, in my example, as the 'rapid fire standard autocannons', cause its an established 'risk/reward' in the tac ops book so I borrowed that.  If its a less harsh drawback then that, Im most likely not going to be happy allowing the Wardog to wreck infantry and aircraft with alternate gauss ammo.  A .3% failure risk, in a 10 turn game of battletech, is impossibly low even if realistic.  We'd have to play 33 games to see it fail once.  A 1/36 though I will likely see in my lifetime however.

I played with 3 ultras last month in my list, 2 20s and a 10, played 6 games, and I jammed once and only with the 10.  And it sucked!  But it was only 1 jam in 6 games.  It felt totally reasonable despite it sucking when it happened.  I hit 4 shots with the 2 20s 2 times total across the 6 games, and that felt more amazing then the 1 time I jammed.  For the BV, I would have been better off with 3 gauss rifles 100%, but it was for fun. 

So anyway, the point is a 1/36 'bad thing' happening isnt the end of the world in battletech, because of the game's nature.  Its very different in 'wargame: red dragon' style simulations.